Life without a News Aggregator - the thing I really missed the most in the 10 days after my hard drive crash was the News Aggregator. In fact, I really didn't miss posting at all (in a few days I'll try to describe the wonderfully liberating feeling of not being able to post to the weblog). But, losing the News Aggregator was a total catastrophe. At first I tried to manually visit some of the weblogs that I used to subscribe to, but it was too hard, and too time consuming. So I completely lost track of what was going on in the old cyber-haunts. That was not liberating. It was downright frustrating.
After I got a new hard drive and started loading software I was hesitant to use Radio, even the News Aggregator part, because I knew that I would need to somehow resynchronize my local stuff with the stuff out there on the Userland server. I didn't want to use Radio at all until I knew that I wasn't going to wreak more havoc upon my weblog. But then I remembered reading a review of Amphetadesk, so I downloaded a copy of that and give it a whirl. It was okay, but nothing like the News Aggregator in Radio so I quickly got discouraged and gave up. One major problem is that you can't delete individual posts that you have already read, and there is no add on tool like rssDistiller for Amphetadesk. And it doesn't run in the background gathering news automatically. You have to tell it to do a scan. I know. Perhaps that doesn't seem like such a big deal, but, having been weened on the Radio News Aggregator, it was a major inconvenience to me. I concluded right away that, even though I didn't really care so much about posting, I had to get my Radio News Aggregator to function again.
So now I'm back in the saddle, and thanks to Lawrence Lee I have my old suscriptions restored and I'm at peace. In fact just a few minutes ago I read my rss feed of new syndicated news feeds and found two new ones on Law that I followed here and here. All I had to do was simply click on the Radio Coffee Mug button and add them to my suscriptions...just as easy as pie. Now this is Heaven...
Later... I heard from the Morbus Iff, who is the creator of Amphetadesk, and he points out that I have some of my facts wrong about what that product can do. I am going to give the product a whirl this weekend and post a new assessment. I was wrong about it not running in the background, for example. You can configure it to scan at regular intervals. Anyway, more about this later, after I have had a chance to play with it. [Ernie the Attorney]
8:00:43 AM 
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